I have been reading a book called Factfulness by Hans Rosling. It is a bestseller.
The book is full of charts and graphs and global statistics from the United Nations through 2016. As a nerd who loves numbers and facts, I find that it is truly a great book.
The radical, leftist fear-monger billionaire Bill Gates, who sponsors a program that claims that students who get the correct answer and show their work in math amounts to white supremacy and racism, also loved the book. On the cover is a quote from Gates: “One of the most important books I’ve ever read — an indispensable guide to thinking clearly about the world.”
The basic premise of the book is that the people of the world don’t know about all the rapid progress throughout the world because the media mislead the public. The author should have included educators, entertainers, politicians, and many billionaires, including Gates himself, as people who collude to intentionally misinform the public. The more the public is scared, the more power and money these people confiscate.
Here are three, of the many, facts in the book:
Life expectancy throughout the world stayed flat at around thirty for 8,000 years, until the 1800s. Then it more than doubled in less than 200 years to more than seventy today. What happened in the 1800s? We started using oil and coal and got electricity. Thousands of products that greatly improve our quality and length of life are derived from crude oil.
Number 2: Women throughout the world are having fewer children. The author gave two reasons. The first is that many more children survive past the age of five than they did in the past. The second is that as the economy and productivity improve, fewer children are needed to perform labor.
Think of farming in the U.S. in the 1800s, where around 90% of the people lived on farms. Today, the number is around one percent. The gas combustion engine, tractors, combines, and other oil-powered equipment have allowed the world to be fed with very few people doing the work.
Number 3: The number of deaths from natural disasters went down by more than half in the last hundred years even while the population went up from around 1.8 billion to around 7.7 billion.
Very few people would guess this fact, considering that every day we are bombarded with talking points about the existential threat of climate change caused by humans and oil. Every time we get a major storm, a flood, a drought, or fires, we are told the lie that it is the worst it has ever been as they push the agenda for more government control and to stop using oil.
Here are some climate facts that we do not see in the media, on TV shows, in movies or in schools because they do not fit the agenda:
Climate Claim Fact Checks:
Climate Change Fact Checks
Climate Change Claim Fact Checks With updates through 01/05/21
Below are a series of rebuttals of the 13 most common climate alarmists’ claims such as those made in the recently r” style=”background: transparent; font-size: inherit !important;”>Heat Waves — have been decreasing since the 1930s in the U.S. and globally.
Hurricanes — the decade just ended as the second quietest for land-falling. hurricanes and land-falling major hurricanes in the U.S. since the 1850s. Twenty twenty saw a record 30 named storms and many Gulf impacts like the quiet solar periods in the late 1800s and this century, but the AC index ranked 13th highest. See 2020 Update showing similarities to late 1800s here and global contrasts here.
Tornadoes — the number of strong tornadoes has declined over the last half-century. More active months occur when unseasonable cold spring patterns are present.
Droughts and Floods — there have been no statistically significant trends.
Wildfires — decreasing since the very active 1800s. The increase in damage in recent years is due to population growth in vulnerable areas and poor forest management. See Australia wildfire story here. See this analysis that shows how public lands are ablaze but private lands are not because they are properly managed here.
Here are some more facts that the media could find about the last 140 years, if they cared, with a couple of hours of simple research:
Crude oil usage in 1880 — 55,000 barrels per day. 2019 — 98 million barrels per day. That is up 1,781 times.
Sea levels appear to have risen less than one foot in the last 140 years. For the Pacific Ocean, that would be 0.000028 out of 36,000.
CO2 content, 1880: around 280 parts per million. Today, over 400 PPM or up 40%. CO2 is a clear, innocuous, non-pollutant gas that allows the world to be fed. Lithium, which the leftists promote, is a very flammable pollutant.
The population has increased from around 1.5 billion in 1880 to around 7.7 billion today, or up over 400%.
A little ice age ended around 1850. The Earth has had several lengthy warming and cooling periods where oil, coal, and humans could not have had any impact.
Scientists estimate that the Earth has warmed around one to two degrees (around 3%) Fahrenheit since 1880. That would be minimal and normal after an ice age ended.
As for Arctic ice: It is around 5.3% lower than the average of 1981 to 2010. Some 95% left is a far cry from being gone, which is what we are constantly being told was going to happen in a short time. The measurements started in 1980. It should be noted that the ice has always melted and thickened with seasons. See this:
Arctic sea ice extent averaged for March 2021 was 14.64 million square kilometers (5.65 million square miles). This was 350,000 squ6are kilometers (135,000 square miles) above the record minimum set in 2017 and 790,000 square kilometers (305,000 square miles) below the 1981 to 2010 average.
There is clearly no direct correlation among oil use, CO2, and population and temperatures, sea levels, and storm activity. Why the heck would we destroy industries and our quality and length of life based on computer models when the scientific facts don’t justify the destruction?
Here is what the media reports to the public as it attempts to indoctrinate and push the agenda. Children are especially susceptible to this propaganda. These are not scientific facts:
In 1922, the AP posted an article that said because of warming, the Arctic ice would soon be gone, coastal cities would be gone, and the oceans were dying. This warning was 100% wrong.
On the first Earth Day in 1970, after over 25 years of global cooling, after 90 years of exponential growth in oil and coal use, after the population from 1.5 billion in 1880 to 3.7 billion in 1970, and a substantial increase in CO2 content, we were told that billions would die from starvation from a catastrophic ice age. This dire prediction was also 100% wrong.
1989: The U.N. and media repeated the same warnings from 1922, and we had only a few years left to solve the existential threat. This dire prediction was 100% wrong.
For decades we have been told there would be snowless winters. This dire prediction was 100% wrong.
In 2005, after Hurricane Katrina, we were told storms were worse than ever and the situation was extremely dangerous. After Katrina, we had an extremely mild ten years of hurricanes.
In 2008, ABC showed a piece of pure propaganda saying that because of the melting Arctic, Manhattan would be under water by 2015. This made up “news” was 100% wrong.
2019: The U.N. and media repeated the same warnings from 1922 and 1989, and we had only a few years left to solve the existential threat. This dire prediction is not based on scientific data, but is meant to mislead the public into submission to get rid of oil and push some version of the green new deal which will destroy America. There are no data to support this, so they use manipulated computer models, which spew forth predictions to push an agenda. No matter how wrong previous predictions have been, the media always present these made up predictions as if they are factual, with no questions asked.
The children have repeatedly been told that polar bears and other species are dying rapidly because of humans, oil, and CO2 induced climate change. There are very few identified species which have gone extinct the last 100 years. When we see that tens of thousands of species are dying each year, that is a made up number.
This article names ten species that have gone extinct and says there are 500, but most we would have never heard of. That is not remotely close to what the public is told.
As for polar bears, there now are more than five times the number of them that were on Earth 70 years ago. Today there are between 22,000 and 31,000. In the 1950s, there were around 5,000. They were being killed, like many species, by hunting, not climate change. But that wouldn’t push the radical leftist agenda, so the facts are ignored.
Polar bears have become the face of climate change — here’s the current state of the species
We are repeatedly told the lie that the science is settled to shut off debate because facts would destroy the people pushing these policies.
We are repeatedly told the lie that anyone who disagrees and tells the truth that the climate has always changed cyclically and naturally a climate change denier. I have never heard anyone deny that the climate changes. We are called deniers to equate us with Holocaust deniers and to mislead the public into believing we are anti-science and stupid. The purpose of these lies is to silence or cancel us.
Shouldn’t the Biden administration be required to justify its policies with scientific data before it destroys industries that provide thousands of products and employ directly or indirectly tens of millions of people? When will supposed journalists ask questions instead of campaigning for the policies?
Higher energy prices will harm everyone, especially the poor, whom the Democrats claim they care about, especially when they are begging for votes.
It doesn’t matter if the media is making up stuff about climate change, seeking to destroy DeSantis with lies about COVID, bragging about Cuomo’s handling on the virus, lying by saying Trump did nothing on the virus, lying about the voting laws in Georgia and elsewhere, burying true stories about the Biden family’s corruption, pretending that the $1.9-trillion slush fund was about COVID, pretending that the $2.2-trillion slush fund is about infrastructure, or spreading lies about Russian collusion. Most of the media are clearly willing to intentionally mislead the public to gain power and money for Democrats. They truly don’t care how many people and businesses they destroy in the process.
The biggest lie of all is when everyone describes Biden’s and other leftists’ policies as progressive. Most of the media act as if they were sensible policies instead of controversial. There is nothing remotely indicating progress from policies meant to destroy our capitalist economy and to move toward socialism. The proper term would be destructive policies. Biden wants to be the most progressive politician since FDR. He is certainly the most destructive president I have seen in my 68 years.
Jack Hellner, American Thinker
THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE 
